Loading assets outside PAK file

Development Programming & Scripting
1

What I want to do is:

  • Have a PAK with some assets
  • Run the PAK
  • Have the ability for the running game to fetch extra assets (textures, meshes, etc) from outside the PAK file. An example would be loading a texture’s .uasset from the file system

Is this possible? I’m aware that I could:

  • Build a new PAK with an empty level and just the assets I want to load
  • Mount it
  • Just dynamically load the assets like they were in the original PAK

This seems to be the approach used in both ModSkeleton and UnrealTournament, but it seems to cause some overhead, since not only is the PAK with the assets in larger than the assets themselves, but it also forces me to have extra steps in my pipeline.

I’ve been looking at both the AssetManager and the ObjectLibrary but it seems that neither will solve my issue.

2

An unpackaged uasset contains some “intellectual property” from Epic Games (and also some asset creators have licences which do not allow unpackaged asset sharing) and you might not have the rights to redistribute that to the end users so I highly doubt that Epic Games would approve of a way to load uassets directly.

After doing some research I found a question about dynamically loading assets which had an answer containing a lot of documentation here